Public Lies That Sap Public Trust

PARIS — Last month in Britain, a former government minister went to prison for making his wife take penalty points on her driver’s license in 2003 for a speeding offense committed by him.

In France, another ex-minister is facing charges of money laundering and tax fraud after he admitted that he had long had undeclared bank accounts, first in Switzerland, then in Singapore.

In both cases, the crimes themselves might have been enough for total disgrace and political ruin; both men were forced to resign.

But the real shockers were the lies — bald-faced whoppers, repeated over and over again, to family and friends, political leaders and parliaments, investigators and the news media, always with straight faces and righteous indignation.

In the case of Chris Huhne, the former British energy secretary and a leading member of the Liberal Democrat party, the lie lasted a decade. As late as 2011, he wasn’t just ducking the truth; he drove right over it. “I’m delighted to say that there’s an official inquiry into all of this stuff,” he said. “I am expecting that the results” of that inquiry “will draw a line under the whole matter and that will be the end of it.”

Two years later, just before he was sentenced to eight months in prison, Mr. Huhne went on British television to apologize. He said that it had all begun with a “relatively minor infringement” but that the lies had soon taken on a life of their own. “It tends to spiral out,” said Mr. Huhne.

In France, Jérôme Cahuzac’s performance was even more breathtaking, particularly since as budget minister, he was in charge of hunting down tax evaders.

In a clip that continues to play on French television, Mr. Cahuzac stood in the National Assembly and declared that he did not have, and had never had, a bank account in Switzerland. When he was asked by a television journalist to look him in the eyes and tell the truth, he repeated the same lie, the one he had told President François Hollande, his fellow Socialist ministers and anyone else who probed the allegation about the secret bank account that surfaced last December in Mediapart, an investigative Web site.

“I’m the one to whom he lied the most — not once, not 10 times, but much more often,” Mr. Cahuzac’s boss, Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici, told The New York Times. “He told me he had nothing to do with that matter, with enormous energy.”

Like everyone else in France, Serge Hefez was both stunned and fascinated by Mr. Cahuzac’s audacity. “He lied for so long and with such aplomb,” said Hefez, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who has made a practice of putting French politicians on the couch.

In 2008, Mr. Hefez, who specializes in family therapy, wrote a book about France’s obsession with its narcissistic president, Nicolas Sarkozy. When Dominique Strauss-Kahn admitted on French television in 2011 that he had committed a “moral fault” during his sexual encounter with a hotel maid in New York, Mr. Hefez was asked by a French newspaper to analyze the performance: He found it less than convincing.

In the Cahuzac case, Mr. Hefez lit on a clue in the former minister’s blog, posted April 2, the day he stopped lying. In it, the minister said he had thought he could avoid confronting a past which he “wanted” to be over.

“I found this ‘wanted’ to be absolutely spectacular,” said Mr. Hefez, speaking in his small office in downtown Paris. “It’s as if he is saying, ‘I wanted that past to have never existed, and that means it didn’t exist.”’

That kind of wishful thinking is common to children, said Mr. Hefez. He compared Mr. Cahuzac to a boy confronted by his parents after they find the missing jam pot in his cupboard. “He looks them straight in the eyes, and says, ‘It wasn't me,’ and he continues to lie, with the same aplomb, to the point where it actually has an effect, and the parents start to doubt, and think maybe they are unjustly accusing him — maybe it was the cleaning lady,” he said.

For a child, said Mr. Hefez, the thought can be more powerful than the truth, particularly if what’s at stake is his good image in the eyes of his parents, who are his ultimate authority. For politicians, he said, that wish can be explosive, precisely because they have authority.

“All of us have lied for all sorts of reasons,” said Mr. Hefez, “but for those in power, there is a sense that no one can stop them. They have a belief that everything is allowed them.”

In France, “l’affaire Cahuzac” has morphed into a debate about the impunity enjoyed by the French elite. Some say Mr. Cahuzac’s strategy of lies is straight out of a political playbook from the 1980s, when French politicians were able to deny the truth and get away with it.

Since then, society has changed, even if some politicians cling to the old ways. The public is less ready to look the other way, and the media are less complicit in keeping open secrets — like Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s sexual excesses, or Mr. Cahuzac’s preference for cash in his hair-transplant practice.

Now it is the lies, perhaps more than the crimes, that sap the public’s trust. The fact that Mr. Cahuzac had a Swiss bank account was “pretty disgusting,” said Mr. Hefez, “but nobody is going to fall off their chair.”

But “to betray a confidence, everyone’s confidence, that is serious,” he said, “because without confidence, societies can’t function.”